Converting a string of landfills and garbage dumps along the eastern shoreline of San Francisco Bay into a state park took 30 years of work by a passionate group of activists. Formal planning for the park took only the last two years. The hard part had been done. A coalition of dedicated and well-organized citizens had changed their communities’ perception of the waterfront, raised the $28 million needed to buy 8.5 miles of shoreline between the Bay Bridge and Richmond from the Santa Fe Railroad, and persuaded public agencies to create a new state park. A waterfront that for decades had been viewed as suitable for dumps and real estate development was perceived as a valued natural habitat and recreation area by the time formal planning for the park began.

Nevertheless, the agencies charged with responsibility for planning, designing, and shaping Eastshore State Park—State Parks, the Coastal Conservancy, and the East Bay Regional Park District, the lead planner—faced a thorny set of issues. The political will that had brought development projects to a halt and forced the agencies to buy the parkland could not agree on the new uses for this land. The citizens’ coalition had been united until it had secured the parkland. With that goal achieved, divergent visions of the park emerged. Some groups wanted to protect the reclaimed shore as wildlife habitat, with minimal human presence; others looked for a more active waterfront, which would accommodate sports and other public uses.

In addition, people who had come to know and enjoy this shoreline in the years it lay untended wanted to make sure they could continue doing so in their own special ways. The shoreline was wild, overgrown with vegetation, and many people had discovered its special qualities. The homeless made it their home; individuals searching for solitude in nature were drawn by its raw character and spectacular views, as were groups looking for excitement and opportunities for creative expression. Sculptures appeared, built of debris dumped into marshlands or washed ashore by winds and tides. Dogs ran free while their owners meandered along informal footpaths, resting mind and spirit in a place that nature was reclaiming. The task of the planners was to forge conflicting interests into a comprehensive vision for the park, embodied in a general plan.

The Place

It takes some imagination to see Eastshore State Park as a single entity. It extends along the fringe of the bay as a series of embayments and peninsulas, covering a total of about 1,800 acres, of which 80 percent is submerged tidelands while the remainder, 400 acres of dry land, is composed almost entirely of landfills. Before filling began, the natural shoreline was about a quarter-mile inland. Five cities—Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley, Albany, and Richmond—and two counties—Alameda and Contra Costa—have jurisdiction over both the water and the land.

To the east is I-80, one of the most congested highways in the country. As commuters creep along—traffic is heavy most of the day—they are afforded views across the bay of the San Francisco skyline, Bay Bridge, Golden Gate Bridge, and Marin Headlands. They may notice shorebirds as they pass the Albany mudflats and the Emeryville Crescent, where salt marsh habitat has been restored by the California Department of Transportation. They may know waterfront parks that have been developed on landfills by Emeryville, Berkeley, and Albany. But few are likely to know of the existence of Eastshore State Park between the road they are traveling and the shimmering water.

The Process

To manage the planning process, the three agencies responsible for Eastshore State Park formed a Steering Committee. They hired me as a planning manager to run the program, and a team of consultants, led by Wallace, Roberts & Todd, LLC, to do the technical planning and environmental analysis. An 18-month process was outlined to reach out to the community and complete all the studies necessary to meet the legal requirements of a state park general plan. The goal was to use the best science and planning principles to guide land use decisions in an open public process. Political scientists call this “transparency” in government. The planning team called it “trusting the process.” Often in this kind of deliberation the most extremist advocates dominate or good science is trumped by bad politics. Sometimes conflicts extend the process and prevent any decision being made at all.

The planning process, which was built on hard deadlines, encouraged public involvement through participation in more than 75 meetings. These included regional workshops in each of the five jurisdictions to present planning milestones: issue identification, alternatives, concept plan and preferred concept, and the environmental impact report. Each of these large meetings, which lasted up to four hours, attracted some 500 people; more than a hundred spoke at each session, with each member of the public limited to three minutes.

The workshops were followed by a set of five local briefings on the planning milestones, held in each of the local jurisdictions. In addition, the planners held “stakeholder” (user groups) meetings, as well as conducting focus groups, site tours, and meetings with other interested organizations. These were all vital face-to-face opportunities for the planners to learn from the community.

A newsletter was produced to announce each regional workshop and provide a summary of the plan, and an extensive web site was created to encourage people to download reports and send e-mail comments to the planning team. In the last year of the project, almost almost 200,000 hits were recorded on this site. An 800 phone number was also effective in allowing the public to communicate with the planning team.

Press coverage of each phase of the effort was extensive. The massive Resource Inventory, Draft Plan, and Draft Environmental Impact Report were made available free of charge at a copy shop and main libraries in each city. As a result of this varied and extensive outreach, most people who wanted to help shape the park’s future ended up feeling heard. And the planners learned about the issues.

The Issues

The east bay is a diverse natural and political environment, and many ideas were put forward. The public’s differing visions and perspectives were mirrored among the agencies. Some steering committee members viewed the park as a string of local parklands, others saw the shoreline as a regional open space, and still others struggled to define an urban state park. All these agency visions conflicted with local desires to continue current informal uses. The planning team proposed innovations which had to be sold to the agencies as feasible in operational as well as political terms.

In the end, the planning process was a balancing act. After meeting in private and much internal negotiation, the steering committee made formal policy decisions for the agencies, emerging in public with a unified position and clear expectations as to the future of Eastshore State Park.

Only one feature was accepted without controversy: the continuation of the Bay Trail through the park. Controversy focused on the value of bird habitat versus sports facilities, off-leash dog use, shoreline access for water sports, and the artworks that had appeared, particularly on the Albany Bulb. The number of facilities proposed in the plan—parking, water access facilities, sports fields—caused some worry. Surprisingly, technical concerns, such as geotechnical and toxic issues, were minor.

Local governments and interest groups wanted specific policies regarding off-leash dog areas, for instance, but park managers wanted flexibility to cover all contingencies during the 20-year planning horizon. Agencies and advocates wanted reassurance that the details were clear, yet a general plan, by definition, must be general. The plan that ultimately emerged was as general as possible, but it resolved most of the use conflicts. The planning team offered tradeoffs between uses, based on known environmental constraints, and the steering committee endorsed them.

Habitat values are to be preserved in principle. Various areas of the park have been classified into three broad categories: preservation, where habitat protection is most stringent; conservation, where public access is permitted but habitat must be considered; and recreation, where intensive public use is allowed. Major creeks that now flow through pipes into the bay are to be “daylighted”—restored to as natural a state as possible. A 75-acre meadow in Berkeley will be enhanced with native plants, in response to a major demand by environmentalists. Parking is to be clustered to support active and passive recreational uses. Off-leash dog walking is to be allowed on 20 percent of the parkland; restrictions are to be imposed on the other 80 percent. Kayaking and windsurfing facilities are to be provided in appropriate areas. Sports fields are to be allowed if stringent environmental constraints can be met. (Late in the planning process, East Bay Regional Parks acquired a site that might prove more appropriate for formal sports facilities than the Albany plateau, the area first selected.) As a trade-off for restricting public access in sensitive natural areas, promenades are proposed for suitable waterfront areas. Facilities essential for visitors and for the park’s operation are included in the plan. Public art is to be incorporated into the park, but the existing art works will be evaluated as cultural resources by State Parks and then removed.

After much controversy regarding the classification of the park under the State Park system, the new park has been classified as a state seashore and formally named Eastshore State Park. The “seashore” classification is new to the State Parks Department and its significance is unclear. However, the environmentalists were reassured that more habitat protection could be provided than in a “state park” or “state recreation area.” The Draft General Plan was reviewed and unanimously approved by the State Parks Commission. It won the support of Citizens for Eastshore State Park, the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, the sports field advocates, and a major dog owners’ group. Local governments and regulatory agencies endorsed it.

Not everyone went away pleased. The windsurfers were disappointed that they will not be able to drive autos to prime launching spots on the Albany Bulb and were not consoled by the promise of new launching facilities elsewhere in the park. An ad hoc group of off-leash dog walkers calling themselves “Let It Be” was incensed by requirements that dogs be on leash in sensitive habitat areas. The group of painters known as “Sniff” was opposed to losing its outdoor studio on the bay. The planning team tried to engage the group in dialogue to develop a creative way of maintaining art in the park, but the artists insisted on their right to unhampered private expression. They considered the planners to be unimaginative bureaucrats.

A tenuous consensus exists on the plan. A broad citizen coalition supports its implementation. Eastshore will have to compete for funding with other State Parks priorities. Park bond funds, mitigation money, and other funding resources will be marshaled by State Parks, the Conservancy, and the East Bay Regional Park District, but only if the citizens’ vision continutes to be palpable and motivates the agencies during fiscally austere times.

Don Neuwirth, an independent planning consultant, was the planning manager for Eastshore State Park. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he was the State’s first Coastal Access Program manager. He launched this magazine in 1985 as California WaterfrontAge.

CLICK HERE for A Milestone in Coastal History about the history of Eastshore Park

CLICK HERE for What Others Say, a sampling of opinions about Eastshore Park